I still stand by my statement that Big Ben will have a larger impact on ticket sales than Mack truck or Vykra.

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I like this because of what is meaningless.

He gave up his afro, his red eye glass frames, and yes, those remote cars. When it all mattered, he went for the bigger pot. Because it was all so easy. In an internal framework, he deserved it.

We all deserve it.

I wish it was a black thing. I wish it was so black, that the palate of the that singular color of magnificence coveted by Renoir, was able to be redirected in todays historic cesspool of something beneath human. Yea, that drowning pool, that choking maneuver, that ends up in the whirling drain of your local bath tub.

As long as Andre Drummond believes that he "slipped" to the #9 pick and that he has top-5 talent, he should be treated like a top-5 player. Start him, and let him share significant minutes with Slava. Frank and his staff can make the game simple for them by limiting what they are asked to do. Be in the right spot on D, rebound and protect the rim. On offense, get every loose ball/rebound.

If we treat Drummond like he's the 2nd best player in the draft, he just might become the 2nd best player the draft. I'm not saying that Frank should simply hand him everything, just make sure he know that the job is his if he decides to take it.

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Good point and I am sure they will play him but without the pressure that Darko had. A lot of pressure comes with a top 3 pick that he will not have to deal with.

What's Ben being brought back to teach the 18 year old rookie - offense?

I contend that Ben never left for that "bigger pot" he left because he felt we were heading in the wrong direction.... forgetting our DEF first identity that was why were in the finals two years in a row. and hindsight being 20/20 we should have gotten rid of flip and kept Ben that summer.

I still stand by my statement that Big Ben will have a larger impact on ticket sales than Mack truck or Vykra.

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I'd be more excited to shell out some dough on tickets to see young guys trying to become the future of the Pistons than old guys who are a part of the recent past.

That being said, I'd be the first guy to line up and buy tickets to "Ben Wallace Night" at the Palace to see the team raise Rodney's Ben's number to the rafters and show my appreciation for everything he's done.

He gave up his afro, his red eye glass frames, and yes, those remote cars. When it all mattered, he went for the bigger pot. Because it was all so easy. In an internal framework, he deserved it.

We all deserve it.

I wish it was a black thing. I wish it was so black, that the palate of the that singular color of magnificence coveted by Renoir, was able to be redirected in todays historic cesspool of something beneath human. Yea, that drowning pool, that choking maneuver, that ends up in the whirling drain of your local bath tub.

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Interesting............I always viewed Renoir as a painter of the female...........the soft and feminine. For me...........it shows up in his male subjects also.

“I didn’t like the way we handled things,” Wallace told ESPN. “We got away from our bread and butter, and that’s on the defensive end. I hear him saying now that I’m gone he can open up the playbook. I laugh at it. Everyone’s looking for something, and for him to say that, he’s fishing for getting a reaction out of me. It’s funny to me, real comical. I never thought you could win when you’ve got five guys on the floor looking for the ball and no one out there doing the little things. So that’s on him. If he feels like that, go ahead.”

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2) Philosophical difference with Flip Saunders. I can't find the quote right now, so I'm going to paraphrase. Flip didn't trust the bench. Every time they got in trouble, Flip bailed them out and put the starters back in the game. Ben wanted to win another Championship and he knew that they would need a major contribution from the bench to survive late in the post season.

3) Money. Ben felt like he was loyal to the organization for a number of years and repaid them for the initial break that they gave him with his extraordinary performance. He knew that his market value was at a high and that in order to get his big financial pay day, he'd have to leave the team. So, in his mind, he was doing himself a favor and doing the team a favor by getting the cash from somewhere else. He didn't just ditch out. He consulted each of CB, Rip, Tay, and Sheed to get their blessing on his decision. It was the polar opposite of LeBron's decision. In addition, he was headed off to a team that valued defense and sought him out.

I do like your post Tashawn and I figure mostly all posters here may agree with you, but for me..........those are the reasons why I fault ben Wallace.

I see opposing values there.........always have. First, I'll (Big BEN) critsize the coach for his methods of not thinking of the team.. ......then I'll leave....thinking ONLY of my payday. Of course the others will give their blessing, but do you think they were happy to see him go?

Joe D made a solid offer to Ben when he it free agency. Chicago overpaid to get him. By something like $2million/year over the Pistons offer. Its hard to fault a guy for going where he is offered the most money. Its not like he pulled a Ray Allen and left for less money.

Joe D made a solid offer to Ben when he it free agency. Chicago overpaid to get him. By something like $2million/year over the Pistons offer. Its hard to fault a guy for going where he is offered the most money. Its not like he pulled a Ray Allen and left for less money.

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It's hard to fault a guy PERIOD for doing what he wants - Ray Allen included - yet fans make a career out of it. We all wish that the players on the teams we love loved the team as much as we do, but the reality is that as irritating as it is to see a player seem to leave without caring about the franchise he's leaving behind, fans are far more egregious about treating players as assets and nothing more. There's no loyalty on either side of the aisle here - Tayshaun Prince, for example, was an integral part of that championship team, had one of the signature plays in basketball history ("the block"), stuck with the team through the difficult times, was drafted by the Pistons and never played for any other NBA franchise, and actually has a reasonable contract right now; yet if you ask any fan about him, their first thought is about the draft pick, cap space, or other asset that they could get in return for him rather than any loyalty to the guy or emotional attachment to him.

These guys are human beings. They have personal desires and beliefs, egos and passions, and we as fans have a hard time getting past the marketing hype to see them for what they are. Ben Wallace was not happy with his work environment and decided to go elsewhere in an attempt to secure a better one. For shame. I'll bet none of you, even if you hated your boss and the company direction, would go to another company for more money and a shot at being happier. I mean, where's a person's sense of decency?

I grew up in a time when the highest paid starting 9 in baseball made less than 1/2 million per season. This was probably 4-5 times the average American's salary. They were assets, but weren't treated as such by the fans. Team was the thing...as players played for the pride of their adopted city. Basketball players didn't make much more, but they brought their "A" game with much more consistency. A baseball contract was 1 page long and was standard throughout the league.

Now.........you get much more showboating.........200 page contracts with rediculous add ons, more pouty players than ever before. And the top 9 in baseball make over 200 million per season. Unfortunately, players are now treated as assets, cause they act like one. Both players and fans are moving more and more towards indifference. I'm afraid our 2004 Pistons were an anomily.............

It's hard to fault a guy PERIOD for doing what he wants - Ray Allen included - yet fans make a career out of it. We all wish that the players on the teams we love loved the team as much as we do, but the reality is that as irritating as it is to see a player seem to leave without caring about the franchise he's leaving behind, fans are far more egregious about treating players as assets and nothing more. There's no loyalty on either side of the aisle here - Tayshaun Prince, for example, was an integral part of that championship team, had one of the signature plays in basketball history ("the block"), stuck with the team through the difficult times, was drafted by the Pistons and never played for any other NBA franchise, and actually has a reasonable contract right now; yet if you ask any fan about him, their first thought is about the draft pick, cap space, or other asset that they could get in return for him rather than any loyalty to the guy or emotional attachment to him.

These guys are human beings. They have personal desires and beliefs, egos and passions, and we as fans have a hard time getting past the marketing hype to see them for what they are. Ben Wallace was not happy with his work environment and decided to go elsewhere in an attempt to secure a better one. For shame. I'll bet none of you, even if you hated your boss and the company direction, would go to another company for more money and a shot at being happier. I mean, where's a person's sense of decency?

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I could not have put it better. This is exactly why so many analysts frustrate me to no end.

You have to look at a basketball player as a productive asset, and/or as a person. There is no real middle ground.

Fans talk about loyalty all the time, but never realise that it is a two way street. Players are judged entirely on their role and production within that role. But a bad season, or a developmental phase, and all of a sudden we want their head on a pike. There is no balance here. People were outraged when Lebron James left Cleveland. But why? We come back to this two way street. I have never understand why anyone apart from Cleveland fans was upset by this. The reality is, that Pat Riley is a better team manager, ran a better team, and had a vision which didn't involve LBJ hero ball. As basketball fans, who can really be upset here?

For us, Prince is an example which should force just a small introspective moment of clarity. Does he contribute to the team at a high level? Yes. He is arguably the most skilled and experienced player on the team. We often forget that Prince, for all his pump fakes and isolations, is one of the best players at the rim in the entire NBA. He plays good defense, and does what he is asked to do. This makes him the consumate professional, and a loyal player. Any one of us would have revolted watching such a brilliant team being dismantled over a tortoringly long period for no real reason.

Some of us often say that we want Prince to go to a team where he will be better utilised and be on a contender. But is this what he wants? Maybe he sticks around because he wants to be a part of the second building of this team. He could very well see things that we don't. Should he be playing 35mpg? Probably not. Was there a better option last year? No.

Is Ben Wallace coming back for the money? At vet minimum, I highly doubt it. Is it for the glory? Probably not. He wants to come back because he loves this team. It is a part of him. We should probably embrace this fact before we attempt to be critical of his stat sheet, and it should definately be a part of the discussion about his return.

I grew up in a time when the highest paid starting 9 in baseball made less than 1/2 million per season. This was probably 4-5 times the average American's salary. They were assets, but weren't treated as such by the fans. Team was the thing...as players played for the pride of their adopted city. Basketball players didn't make much more, but they brought their "A" game with much more consistency. A baseball contract was 1 page long and was standard throughout the league.

Now.........you get much more showboating.........200 page contracts with rediculous add ons, more pouty players than ever before. And the top 9 in baseball make over 200 million per season. Unfortunately, players are now treated as assets, cause they act like one. Both players and fans are moving more and more towards indifference. I'm afraid our 2004 Pistons were an anomily.............

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With all due respect, you did grow up in a time when the team and the fans treated its players like assets - you just don't remember that way because everyone looks back on their youth with rose-colored glasses. My dad waxes nostalgic about baseball winter meetings, when GMs would get together and, according to my dad, "make hundreds of trades." That type of whimsical reminiscence sure feels like seeing players as assets to me. And I doubt that most players ever played for pride of the city - I suspect that the media made it seem that way because there were two or three newspapers per city and it was much easier to control the flow of information.

As far as Basketball players bringing their "A" game with much more consistency, I really doubt that's the case. I suspect that today's players work harder on their game than any generation of their predecessors did. I doubt that Chuck Nevitt was putting nearly a hundred hours a week in the gym, weight room, and film room (and if he did, someone deserved to be fired). Again, the reason you look back on these guys as hard workers is because they were assets to the team, and the team shut them up much more effectively than they can now.

Look at some of the greats with a rational eye and you'll see what I mean. Ty Cobb was an all-time jerk that would have been kicked out of the league if he had played in the modern era. Ted Williams was a jackass. Babe Ruth was an abusive drunk. Stan Musial assaulted an opposing pitcher with a baseball bat on the field. Mantle and Maris had that famous home run race, but by all accounts the two didn't like each other that much. Pete Rose ("Charlie Hustle") gambled away his integrity. These guys weren't heroes, they were just portrayed that way at the time.

Were there heroes? Sure. Jackie Robinson probably did more for race relations in this country than anyone else other than MLK. Roberto Clemente died on a plane trip to deliver aid to earthquake victims. I'm sure you can come up with many more, as well. And there are heroes now (the cynic might claim it's all PR, but I'd argue that sports players today are still doing more good for the world than they ever have before).

Players having loyalty to a team is a myth created by the teams controlling the information. The truth is that those players were company men because they HAD to be. There was no free agency, so there was no option. You either played for your team or you were out of baseball. It was flatly un-American by our standards today, but we wish we could go back to that era because it was simpler to be a fan in a world where you had the good guys and the bad guys and only the team owners had anything to do with who was who. It's much more complex now, and that's not a bad thing - it's just different.